


Telltale

by starkraving



Category: Destiny (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23903989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Not every Guardian remembers how they died. But Ghosts can only guess at the past.
Kudos: 24





	Telltale

He’s buzzed.

Your Guardian is buzzed and hours between needing de-frag. Won’t be dropping into standby anytime soon (for seventeen hours, three minutes, forty-two seconds provided current processes maintain) and that leaves you and him and the question. Quite a question. You’ve thought on it some, but not too much (you’ve thought it a thousand ways and then one) and you think you know how to answer. But now, faced with your Guardian’s slow-pulsed eyes, staring unfocused and flickering up at you, your thousand recursions on the problem fall quietly aside.

“Ghost,” he says, running his fingertips across the wall. “Ghost, do you know how I died?”

“How would I know that, Nico? You died so long ago.”

It’s no answer. You know this. You say it anyway – to buy a moment, to revisit your recursions, but also because you want to know what he thinks you capable of. You are still new to each other after all. He stops touching the wall, inspects his dull alloy fingers. Note this: the scrapes where heavy use tarnishes creases and seams. The lazy smoothness in how he opens and closes his hand, the static you feel in his electromagnetics, the static in his voice thickening. Technically, the buzz is damage, erratic charge in the complex structures of his head. You could repair it, wipe away the electrical haze, but you don’t.

Your Guardian chose to do this to himself and you, Ghost, you must respect what he chooses to do.

“I dunno.” Nico shutters his optics, makes a low Mechanical sound. “I thought maybe you might… I dunno. See something about the people you pick to rez. Can Ghosts not do that?”

“I can’t see the past and I can’t see the future. Not like that.”

“Some of your lot act like they can.”

“And they’re insufferably cryptic annoyances. I can see you, though. And you’re pretty buzzed.”

“Ha.” Nico stretches out on his cot, disturbing a small collection of bottle caps on the mattress. They clink as he picks one up and holds it in his palm, gently, not crushing the rusted little chip. It says Coca-Cola on the cap. Eventually, Nico opens his eyes and looks up at you. He shrugs, the glow of throat-lights winking out an Exo-smile. “Are you worried about me?”

“I am. I am always worried.”

“That’s bad, Ghost. Don’t worry.”

“Shaxx was pretty mad with you today. The Vanguard might ban you. This is bad.”

He shrugs.

“Crucible is where you train. Where all Guardians train. How can you fight if you don’t train?”

“I know how to fight. I’m an Exo.”

“All instinct and latent combat directives. That’s not the same as knowing how to fight and you know it. You have never learned to die.”

“I’ve died, Ghost.”

“But you don’t remember it.”

“That’s why I asked you.”

It’s quiet for a moment. Nico looks at you and, to you, what is he? A fixed point of flame and lightning. A way-point. True north. A magnetic pull dragging you from the Light to the ends of the violent galaxy. Do you tell him? How long you searched? How you dimmed? How the Light nearly faded from you that day you found him in the wreckage of a Venusian city, buried in the burning mountains? He’s a spoiled war machine. A stubborn terminator. Your Guardian. A jolt-sluggish Exo slightly too large for his barracks-assigned cot, blinking slow up at you.

“I cannot see the past, but I could guess at it.”

Nico perks up at that. “Okay.”

“Are you sure you want me to guess at this?”

“You said I need to learn how to die. So, tell me how I died.”

Do Ghosts love their Guardians? That’s a another question. Can orbital bodies love the planets that pull them into their gravity? Can you cherish the star around which you rotate? You would die for him if it would save him, you know this. You will follow him into the screaming howling darkness and watch it swallow him and pray that he comes back from the battlefield. You are going to die with him one day because the detonation of a dwarf star will not be so ruinous as the day he goes back to the silence without you.

“During the Collapse, the Exos fell. The Cryptarchs tell us this – like a great blow struck them all down. As a race, they fell in battle together and simultaneously across our Solar System and they could not be revived. Humanity lost its children and then, in the darkness and silence and ruin, they forgot them.”

Nico is fiddling with the bottle cap, hands resting on his chest, he rotates it gentle between his thumbs. He collects them. You’re not sure why. He only says he likes them and that it enough reason for you to scan the ground for them, to nab them from table tops in the cantina, de-mat them away for later addition to the pile. Ghosts stealing bottle-caps. You tell anyone who asks you’re helping recycle.

“The Exos dreamed and you know what of.”

Nico’s throat lights dim. Quietly, he says, “The Deep Stone.”

“Yes. That’s what we know now.”

Nico is an Exo, so he doesn’t physically shudder, but you can feel it in the wavelength of his field, rippling uncomfortably around him.

Then it’s very quiet.

Again, do you tell him? You were dying when you found him dead. Do you tell him he was half-buried in centuries of mud, that so much of him had corroded away the corpse was a shell of rotting wirework and bio-mechanics? You were so exhausted you fell against the ruined shelf of his collarbone and rolled into the dirt, the blue of your light flickering against his shoulder. You came so close to failure lying inches from your strange heart that, even now, it terrifies you to think of it: the alternate universe where you died lying next to him.

No. Just answer the question. How did your Guardian die?

“When I found you, Nico, someone had opened your chest with a cutting torch.”

He looks up at you. He looks hurt, as though lightly struck. “What?”

“It wasn’t a battle. You were like so many Exos during the Dark Age – whole armies lying in the streets of dead cities, dreaming their souls into existence. No one knew better. It was a desperate era and I think someone hoped they could… salvage power from your fusion-core.” You’re drifting downward, catch yourself and shore up courage. “I’m sorry, Guardian, they cut your heart out while you dreamed. That’s why you don’t remember dying.”

Nico is sitting up now, his elbows draped over his bent knees. He’s inspecting the bottlecap, saying nothing, so you drift slightly nearer to him, hovering over the jut of his shoulder. After a while, drift slightly leftward and collide, gently, with his temple. He glances at you, a flicker of wryness in the pattern of his throat-lights.

“I’m sorry.”

“Did it work?”

“What?”

“Them taking the fusion core. Would that have worked?”

“I – no. Probably not.” Hesitate a moment, not sure if you’re to elaborate but the silence is uncomfortable so you add, “Exo fusion cores are made to be inside Exos. It’s not an adaptable system, at least not to anyone living post Golden Age. They would have needed a synthetic surgeon or auto-doc of some kind to even get the core out in a functional condition, but adapting it for alternative power production… it’s unlikely.”

“So it didn’t help them.”

“No.”

He makes a quiet noise, an Exo sound, mechanical cut with vocoder inflection. He sounds disappointed and you’re too scared to ask what, exactly, has disappointed him. That an ancient dead scavenger cut him open and killed him, or that the same unwitting murderer might have died anyway, futilely cutting into mechanical corpses as all of Venus went dark around them. Fear his capacity for resentment… or forgiveness. Both worry you.

But after the moment is past he says, “Thanks, Ghost. I know you don’t like thinking about it.”

You’re surprised he’s picked up on that, correctly so.

Don’t say as much, just say, “You’re welcome, Guardian.” And, after another moment, “I found two more caps, by the way. If you want them.”

“Show me.”


End file.
